Rudy Guliani's Uzbek Connection

According to this week's New Yorker profile by Peter J. Boyer, he's New York used-car dealer and actor Elliott Cuker:

It became clear at the start of Giuliani’s political career that his courtroom talents—the ability to break a witness o the stand, for example—were not especially useful in the task of charming voters. In Giuliani’s delivery style, ther was no trace of the natural politician. Apart from mechanical liabilities—including a lateral lisp that produces a slushy “s” sound—Giuliani was impaired by a native harshness that proved resistant to the remedies of his political advisers. I both runs against Dinkins, Giuliani’s campaign enlisted the candidate’s wife, Donna Hanover, in an effort to humaniz her husband through television ads. (These ads are now YouTube staples.) Old friends and trusted advisers, such a Peter Powers, despaired of ever coaxing a softer Giuliani to the fore. Then, about midway through his first term Giuliani turned himself over to a man named Elliot Cuker, who, in short order, had him squeezing into a dress

In Giuliani’s circle, Cuker functioned variously as the Mayor’s drama coach, his personal adviser, and his best friend. Born near Tashkent, Cuker had worked as an actor before establishing a successful business selling classic automobiles. During a stint in private law practice in the nineteen-seventies, Giuliani represented Cuker in a tax case, and the two men established a bond that both amused and puzzled Giuliani’s political associates. Cuker, unrestrained by deference, was credited by Giuliani with crafting a speaking style for him—a conversational persuasiveness—that became a political strength (and a source of vast wealth on the lecture circuit). “He was a dreadful speaker,” Cuker recalls of the early public Giuliani. “He was stiff, and his forehead would get drenched, with sweat running down both sides of the temples. He was extraordinarily uncomfortable speaking.”

Giuliani was a pliant student, making himself available to Cuker at all hours. “I’m a member of the Actors Studio,” Cuker told me, “and I had the key to the Actors Studio, and when everybody left I would take him there sometimes, like at ten o’clock at night, and work with him. But we worked everyplace.” Cuker’s aim was to force Giuliani away from his notes and toward spontaneity. “The fact is, I got close enough to him as a friend, at the time, that he had such trust in what I’m doing with him, that he let himself truly open up to me in a way that he really hadn’t done with anybody,” Cuker said. “And he’s become very spontaneous, as you can see. Very spontaneous.”

By the time Giuliani gave his third state-of-the-city address, in 1996, he left his notes on the lectern and, microphone in hand, walked about the stage, “talking” his speech. “Just talk to the people,” Cuker had advised. “Connect to the people.” Giuliani gave Cuker a parking pass at Gracie Mansion, and put him in charge of the annual Inner Circle political dinners—the municipal equivalent of the Washington Gridiron Club dinner, in which politicians and members of the press kid each other in skits and songs. Cuker saw the Inner Circle performances as another means of shaping the Mayor’s image. “I would rewrite a Broadway show to put Rudy into the show to help with what he needed at the time, politically, for his image,” Cuker recalled. “For example, when he was throwing Arafat out of Lincoln Center, people saw him as being very angry.” In 1995, during a United Nations celebration, Giuliani called Arafat a “murderer” and had him removed from a concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Cuker continued, “What I did was I chose the show ‘Grease,’ and I rewrote the show. And I put him on a motorcycle, and I showed him as a Hells Angel rebel back in school, and how it all started. So every show I did had a purpose.”

It was Cuker who was responsible for Giuliani’s turns in drag, which have also become a YouTube staple. “I am the one who convinced him that it would be a great idea to put him in a dress, soften him up, and help him get the gay vote,” Cuker says. “And, ultimately, it was his biggest bonus, because he got the gay vote—and the conservatives, who couldn’t believe that he had the balls to do something like that. It was a home run for him, and he got national attention. It showed that he had a sense of humor.”

Cuker accompanied Giuliani to the golf course and to Yankee Stadium, and talked with him on the phone a half-dozen times a day. When Cuker sensed that the Mayor needed a retreat, he opened a cigar bar—Cooper Classic Cars and Cigars, on West Fifty-eighth Street—which became Giuliani’s Elaine’s. “We were almost like brothers,” Cuker says now. “We were extremely close. He had a very strong trust in me, and he knew that I cared about him. And he knew that, whatever I did, I always tried to be there for him, and to help him with that other part of himself.”

Rudy Giuliani's Foreign Policy Manifesto

From "Toward a Realistic Peace," published in the September issue of Foreign Affairs:

The next U.S. president will face three key foreign policy challenges. First and foremost will be to set a course for victory in the terrorists' war on global order. The second will be to strengthen the international system that the terrorists seek to destroy. The third will be to extend the benefits of the international system in an ever-widening arc of security and stability across the globe. The most effective means for achieving these goals are building a stronger defense, developing a determined diplomacy, and expanding our economic and cultural influence. Using all three, the next president can build the foundations of a lasting, realistic peace.

Achieving a realistic peace means balancing realism and idealism in our foreign policy. America is a nation that loves peace and hates war. At the core of all Americans is the belief that all human beings have certain inalienable rights that proceed from God but must be protected by the state. Americans believe that to the extent that nations recognize these rights within their own laws and customs, peace with them is achievable. To the extent that they do not, violence and disorder are much more likely. Preserving and extending American ideals must remain the goal of all U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. But unless we pursue our idealistic goals through realistic means, peace will not be achieved.

Idealism should define our ultimate goals; realism must help us recognize the road we must travel to achieve them. The world is a dangerous place. We cannot afford to indulge any illusions about the enemies we face. The Terrorists' War on Us was encouraged by unrealistic and inconsistent actions taken in response to terrorist attacks in the past. A realistic peace can only be achieved through strength.

A realistic peace is not a peace to be achieved by embracing the "realist" school of foreign policy thought. That doctrine defines America's interests too narrowly and avoids attempts to reform the international system according to our values. To rely solely on this type of realism would be to cede the advantage to our enemies in the complex war of ideas and ideals. It would also place too great a hope in the potential for diplomatic accommodation with hostile states. And it would exaggerate America's weaknesses and downplay America's strengths. Our economy is the strongest in the developed world. Our political system is far more stable than those of the world's rising economic giants. And the United States is the world's premier magnet for global talent and capital.

Still, the realist school offers some valuable insights, in particular its insistence on seeing the world as it is and on tempering our expectations of what American foreign policy can achieve. We cannot achieve peace by promising too much or indulging false hopes. This next decade can be a positive era for our country and the world so long as the next president realistically mobilizes the 9/11 generation for the momentous tasks ahead.

Meanwhile, Fox News reports Giuliani is opposed to formation of a Palestinian state:

Outlining his foreign policy views in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Giuliani said "too much emphasis" has been placed on brokering negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians -- an apparent swipe at President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who have been pushing both sides for final status negotiations despite Hamas's takeover of Gaza in June.

"It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism," the former New York City mayor said.

"Palestinian statehood will have to be earned through sustained good governance, a clear commitment to fighting terrorism, and a willingness to live in peace with Israel," Giuliani said. "America's commitment to Israel's security is a permanent feature of our foreign policy."

Christopher Hitchens on HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

How did I miss this last Sunday?

For some time now the novels have been attempting a kind of secular dramatization of the battle between good and evil. The Ministry of Magic (one of Rowling’s better inventions) has been seeking to impose a version of the Nuremberg Laws on England, classifying its subjects according to blood and maintaining its own Gestapo as well as its own Azkaban gulag. But again, over time and over many, many pages this scenario fails to chill: most of the “muggle” population goes about its ordinary existence, and every time the secret police close in, our heroes are able to “disapparate” — a term that always makes me think of an attempt at English by George W. Bush. The prejudice against bank-monopoly goblins is modeled more or less on anti-Semitism and the foul treatment of elves is meant to put us in mind of slavery, but the overall effect of this is somewhat thin and derivative, and subject to diminishing returns.

In this final volume there is a good deal of loose-end gathering to be done. Which side was Snape really on? Can Neville Longbottom rise above himself? Are the Malfoys as black as they have been painted? Unfortunately — and with the solid exception of Neville, whose gallantry is well evoked — these resolutions prove to possess all the excitement of an old-style Perry Mason-type summing-up, prompted by a stock character who says, “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. ...” Most of all this is true of Voldemort himself, who becomes more tiresome than an Ian Fleming villain, or the vicious but verbose Nicolae Carpathia in the Left Behind series, as he offers boastful explanations that are at once grandiose and vacuous. This bad and pedantic habit persists until the final duel, which at least sees us back in the old school precincts once again. “We must not let in daylight upon magic,” as Walter Bagehot remarked in another connection, and the wish to have everything clarified is eventually self-defeating in its own terms. In her correct determination to bring down the curtain decisively, Rowling has gone further than she should, and given us not so much a happy ending as an ending which suggests that evil has actually been defeated (you should forgive the expression) for good.

Greater authors — Arthur Conan Doyle most notably — have been in the same dilemma when seeking closure. And, like Conan Doyle, Rowling has won imperishable renown for giving us an identifiable hero and a fine caricature of a villain, and for making a fictional bit of King’s Cross station as luminous as a certain address on nearby Baker Street. It is given to few authors to create a world apart, and to populate it as well as illustrate it in the mind. As one who actually did once go to boarding school by steam train, at 8, I enjoyed reading aloud to children and coming across Diagon Alley and Grimmauld Place, and also shuddering at the memory of the sarcastic schoolmasters (and Privet Drives) I have known.

The distinctly slushy close of the story may seem to hold out the faint promise of a sequel, but I honestly think and sincerely hope that this will not occur. The toys have been put firmly back in the box, the wand has been folded up, and the conjuror is discreetly accepting payment while the children clamor for fresh entertainments. (I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.) It’s achievement enough that “19 years later,” as the last chapter-heading has it, and quite probably for many decades after that, there will still be millions of adults who recall their initiation to literature as a little touch of Harry in the night.

You can buy it here from Amazon.com:

Find Out Who's Editing Wikipedia Entries

With this neat Wikiscanner (ht lgf).

Picasso on Government Arts Funding

After attending a disappointing free dance recital at the Carter Barron amphitheatre in Rock Creek Park featuring pretentious wannabe Twyla Tharp-types who seemed to have program descriptions written for NEA grants (the only good group was a troupe of students who looked like they ranged in age from 7-27 from a DC tap-dancing school) this quote from Picasso leaped out of David Caute's The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War:

Only the Russians are naive enough to think that an artist can fit into society. That's because they don't know what an artist is...Even Mayakovsky committed suicide. There is absolute opposition between the creator and the state...People reach the status of artist only after crossing the maximum number of barriers. So the arts should be discouraged, not encouraged.

More on David Caute here.

Ann Althouse on Hillary's First TV Ad

I don't think she likes it:

Wow! Does she think you are invisible! But she's not saying she views you as a massive horde of nonentities. Oh, no! She's the one who is here to make you visible. She's got the power to heal you of your invisibility. Just a word from her lips..

James Bowman on Becoming Jane

He doesn't like it much:

This is so obvious that we are forced to the conclusion that Becoming Jane has made not the slightest attempt to imagine itself back into Jane Austen’s time. Instead, it drags her into ours and so makes her utterly unlike what we know she was. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do, but we know at the outset that it is false as hell. The people in Jane Austen’s time simply didn’t go around thinking that all they needed was to loosen up sexually and allow women more freedom to choose their own destinies. Certainly Jane Austen didn’t. The beliefs about sex and families and money that people held in Jane Austen’s time may have been benighted, but they really did hold them. Not to give them credit for this but instead to treat them as if they were children who simply didn’t know any better — as if they could have been put right by any prematurely "experienced" high school girl of today — is worse than philistinism. It is an act of historical vandalism.

Paul Gigot on Karl Rove's Resignation

In the Wall Street Journal:

A big debate among Republicans these days is who bears more blame for 2006--Messrs. Bush and Rove, or the behavior of the GOP Congress. Mr. Rove has no doubt. "The sense of entitlement was there" among Republicans, he says, "and people smelled it." Yet even with a unified Democratic Party and the war, he argues, it was "a really close election." The GOP lost the Senate by its 3,562 vote margin of defeat in Montana, and in the House the combined margin in the 15 seats that cost control was 85,000 votes.

A prominent non-Beltway Republican recently gave me a different analysis, arguing that the White House made a disastrous decision to "nationalize" the election last autumn; this played into Democratic hands and cost numerous seats.

"I disagree," Mr. Rove replies. "The election was nationalized. It was always going to be about Iraq and the conduct of Republicans." He says Republican Chris Shays and Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman survived in Connecticut despite supporting the war, while Republicans who were linked to corruption or were complacent lost. His biggest error, Mr. Rove says, was in not working soon enough to replace Republicans tainted by scandal.

What about that new GOP William McKinley-style majority he hoped to build--isn't that now in tatters, as the country tilts leftward on security, economics and the culture? Again, Mr. Rove disagrees. He says young people are if anything more pro-life and free-market than older Americans, and that, despite the difficulties in Iraq, the country doesn't want to be defeated there or in the fight against Islamic terror. He recalls how Democrats thought driving the U.S. out of Vietnam would also help them politically. "Instead, Democrats have suffered ever since on national security," he says.

Mr. Rove also makes a spirited defense of this president's policy legacy, sometimes more convincingly than others. On foreign affairs, he predicts that at least two parts of the Bush Doctrine will live on: The policy that if you harbor a terrorist, you are as culpable as the terrorist; and pre-emption. "There may be a debate about degree," he says, "but it's going to be hard for any president to reverse that."

Will Dick Cheney be the next to go?

Cold-Hearted Survivior

For some reason, article by Joel Garreau in yesterday's Washington Post caught my eye:

Peter Houghton is grateful for his artificial heart. After all, it has saved his life.

He's just a little wistful about emotions.

He wishes he could feel them like he used to.

Houghton is the first permanent lifetime recipient of a Jarvik 2000 left ventricular assist device. Seven years ago, it took over for the heart he was born with. Since then, it has unquestionably improved his physical well-being. He has walked long distances, traveled internationally and kept a daunting work schedule.

At the same time, he reports, he's become more "coldhearted" -- "less sympathetic in some ways." He just doesn't feel like he can connect with those close to him. He wishes he could bond with his twin grandsons, for example. "They're 8, and I don't want to be bothered to have a reasonable relationship with them and I don't know why," he says.

He can only feel enough to regret that he doesn't feel enough.

Could the poets have been right all these millennia? Could emotions be matters of the heart?

The King Who Would Be An Ordinary Man

Registan has just published a moving appreciation of the late King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan by Dr Ehsan Azari:

A king who was borne as a prince and died as an ordinary citizen, the ex-Afghan king, Zahir Shah was the most democratic head of state in Asia for many decade until he was deposed in 1973. He ascended to the throne in 1933 when his father was killed by a student with a personal vendetta. During the time of his reign, all neighbouring countries of Afghanistan had been ruled by tyranny and colonial powers. Iran was under a despotic monarch, Raza Shah, with his notorious intelligence Savak, Pakistan was under a military dictatorship, and Central Asian countries, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, were all colonies of the Soviet empire.

In 1964, he formed a new constitution in the country which ushered in a democratic and parliamentarian government. Within an overall Islamic context, the constitution guaranteed woman emancipation, human rights, and freedom of press. But he failed to sign the legislation authorising the formation of political parties, despite its recognition by the constitution. This also helped the semi underground communist party to flourish across the country.

He advocated modernisation, reforms, and economic development. In his time Afghan women were more free than hey have been in the past three centuries of Afghan history. Women were not forced to cover themselves from head to toe with burqas and they had full access to education.

“When we were kids our family used to live in single room that was too long. When one began to cough all would cough, and if one fell ill all would fall ill. At elementary school in Kabul, our teacher beat us by rulers. When young I tried to learn Sitar but failed,” he said in an interview to BBC.

Zahir Shah was a soft hearted and peaceful leader who was tolerant of his political dissident. His subjects remember more of this than himself. (He was once driving past a busy street in Kabul when he saw a public water tap had been left open, he stopped and from his Choverolate window asked a person to close the tape and advised that it was not wise to leave water going down the street. The young tailor’s apprentice who knew he was the king shouted: “you are drinking the blood of a thousand poor people, it is better to stop that”. The king slowly drove past.

Watching all this, the tailor stormed out of his shop and began to beat the rude folk black and blue while crying: “What have you done? What will happen to us now?” A few weeks later, the young man recovered from his wounds and the king forgot everything.

Another time a man was once sentenced to death in Kandahar for killing someone’s brother. According to Islamic laws if the closest one to murdered victim pardons the accused, he can be saved from execution. The king took his hat off to the man and begged for the convict to be pardoned. But the vengeful man refused.

Sadly, there was a snake lurking amongst the royal court. His own fist cousin and brother-in-law, Daoud Khan, staged a bloodless coup and deposed the king while holidaying in Italy. Like Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Daoud had overweening arrogance, and after five years of an authoritarian rule he was brutally killed by a bunch of low-ranking communist and non-commissioned officers in a bloody coup, slaughtering nearly all of his family and close relatives in 1978.

Zahir Shah’s fall was not only the fall of his dynasty but the portent of the endless tragedy in waiting for his country. A year later the communist coup paved the way for the Russian genocidal occupation. A decade later, the Russian’s defeat and departure from Afghanistan, and the loss of one and a half million Afghans didn’t bring liberty and peace. Upon the toppling of the communist regime in 1992, the warlords and Islamist militants entered Kabul and avenged themselves upon the city and its tortured inhabitants with murder, pillage, rape, and destruction. Then the Taliban ushered in a galloping medieval theocracy, philistinism, and the terrorism of Osama bin Laden that reduced Afghanistan to the land of the dead.

A Turkish Model for Iraq

James Lewis argues in The American Thinker that Iraq needs to follow Ataturk's model of building a strong military to hold Islamists in check:

There is a fallback option to a perfect democracy in Iraq. That is the Turkish solution, which has worked in other countries, beginning with Kemal Ataturk's aggressive reforms in 1923. That is for the Army to become the guarantor of electoral governments. Turkey is riven by many political and religious factions, from modernizers and to open reactionaries. In the last election some 50 parties fielded slates, but only three made it over the 10 percent threshold into parliament. It is Ataturk's Turkish Army that has consistently been the most unifying and modernizing national force for eight decades. And by having a universal draft for young males, the modernizers have exercised great influence to bring the former Ottoman Empire into a mixed system, with a strong element of electoral legitimacy.

Today that system is endangered by three successive elections in which the Islamist AKP has won up to 40 percent of the vote. Given Turkey's winner-take-all parliamentary system, that means Islamists control all the cabinet departments. The AKP has used that leverage to infiltrate its supporters into the bureaucracy, while claiming to be reshaping Turkey to fit European standards of electoral legitimacy. (The EU is itself not elected, of course, being staffed by socialist careerists, but it is still shaping the Turkish political scene.)

While the Turkish Army does may be unacceptable by Western standards, it's pretty good for the Middle East: When the electoral system throws up a wild regime, the Army simply takes governments into receivership, runs the country until Islamist reactionaries are pushed back, and then goes back to the barracks. General Musharraf has done much the same thing in Pakistan. Indonesia has a similar dynamic, and Jordan's Hashimite dynasty depends upon its army as well.

The question is whether the new Iraqi Army, rebuilt from the bottom up by the Americans with Coalition help, can become a modernizing and unifying force in a new Iraq. It may be the only acceptable solution, because so far, Iraqi politicians have not been able to make their parliamentary system work.

Lenin's Philosophy Steamer

When I interviewed applicants for Fulbright Scholarships to study in the United States, I was surprised at the number of Russians who said they wanted to travel to America in order to look at the papers of sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who taught at Harvard. A new book helps explain the importance of this dissident sociologist, one of the first wave of intellectual Russian refugees expelled on the orders of Lenin. Bill Grimes' fascinating review of Lesley Chamberlain's Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia in the New York Times yesterday puts Sorokin's story in context--and explains why Russians are interested in his fate. An excerpt:

It certainly deserves to be better known, if only for the light it sheds on the often fumbling efforts of Lenin’s regime to impose its harsh ideology. Lenin and his enemies sprang from the same soil of opposition to czarism, believed in a special destiny for Russia and in many ways thought the same thoughts. Although branded as enemies of the state, the purged intellectuals were exiled, not shot, because, Ms. Chamberlain speculates, “Lenin was prepared to treat them with a minimum of civic dignity, as his equals on the defeated side.”

In the early 1920s, ideological divisions had not yet hardened to the point of eliminating all human feeling. In a telling instance, the secret police officers monitoring the launch of the Philosophy Steamer raised their hats in salute as it left the harbor, shouting: “We are all Russians. Why is this happening?”

At the same time, the manufacturing of evidence, the manipulation and rewriting of the legal code and the government’s brazen lying to its own people and the West amounted to a rough draft for the future. In an interview with an American journalist, Trotsky carefully explained that the expulsions were an act of mercy, because in the event of renewed civil war, the exiled intellectuals would probably go over to the enemy, and then they would have to be shot.

The legal grounds for expulsion and transcripts of interrogations make particularly chilling reading. Some intellectuals were marked down by the secret police for such offenses as “knows a foreign language” or “is ironic and fools about in his lectures.” Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, the head of the White underground movement, sized up his interrogators perfectly. When asked his attitude toward Soviet power, he replied, “I am watching its development with interest.”

That was true of his fellow victims too. Their fatal weakness was to be cultivated humanists with no political program other than a belief in personal liberty and the importance of moral values rooted in religion. The language of totalitarianism was unintelligible to them, and not only to them.

“The idea that a single and total view of the world could be universally imposed by a brutal police regime was a new political fate in the modern world,” Ms. Chamberlain writes. Lenin’s exiles had the misfortune to be the advance guard in a persecuted army whose numbers would soon be legion.

You can read a sample chapter by clicking this link.

How Not to Win "Hearts and Minds"

From Johnson's Russia List:

Russian Schoolchildren Allege Mistreatment in US English Language Program

Rossiyskaya Gazeta
August 6, 2007
Article by Vladislav Kulikov: "Tourist Trip
Survival Course; Russian Schoolchildren Treated Like Criminals in USA"

A scandal erupted yesterday with Russian
children, who had encountered purely American hospitality.

A group of schoolchildren, who had gone on an
educational program to study English in
California, but in essence found themselves in
survival courses, returned to Moscow.

"This was simply awful, I will never again go to
America," said 16-year old Yulya, exiting the
arrivals gate at Sheremetyevo-2. "They simply
hate us there. They housed us in a dormitory,
where the doors did not close. They were
constantly digging around in our things. The
director of the dormitory, her name was Nancy,
was always saying, "you, Russians, are lame-brains."

Also, as the children recounted, shady characters
of all nationalities wandered about the corridors
of the student campus "and offered drugs, sex,
and anything you wanted." We will note that the
youngest of our schoolchildren were 11 years old,
and the eldest--16-18. They had expected
something entirely different from America.

"Initially, it was presumed that the children
would be housed with families," the mother of one
of the trip participants, Tatyana Sinchenko, told
our Rossiyskaya Gazeta correspondent. "The tour
was called 'Host Family,' and was very expensive.
I would not allow myself such a thing, but one
spares no expense for one's child. Literally at
the last moment, at the airport before the
flight, the parents were informed that there were
no host families for our children, and therefore
they would be housed in dormitories at the
California State University in Long Beach. If
someone refused, they would not get all their money back."

Literally 20 minutes before the start of
registration for the flight, the shocked parents
signed consent forms, agreeing to this
"force-majeur circumstance." We learned about the
fact that, in accordance with this "new" program,
the children would go hungry on weekends and in
the evenings already from their reports from the other continent.

The happy American tour was organized by English
First--the world's largest private educational
company, specializing in language instruction.
That is now it describes itself on its website.
But, judging by the recounts of parents, the
clients of the educational company are treated as
they would be by some fly-by-night tourist firm,
or even worse. When the children started having
problems, the management of the Russian branch
office suddenly became unreachable. Whoever
answered the phone knew absolutely nothing, and did not want to know anything.

The most outrageous incident during the tour
occurred with a 15-year old girl, against whom
unfounded accusations of using alcohol were
leveled and she was taken to the police station,
where she was treated like a criminal.

"After that, my daughter was kept locked up for 2
days, without food or water," the girl's mother,
Yelena Fishkova, said with indignation. "Why, that is a matter for a lawsuit!"

They kept her locked up not at the police
station, but in the dormitory, where the director
made something akin to her own jail. She locked
children up in her office without food. They were
allowed only to drink and go to the bathroom, and
only then if they asked nicely. Even after the
police issued a statement as to the innocence of
the girl from Russia, the director continued to
keep her imprisoned. The schoolgirl was released
only after her mother made special arrangements
for a lawyer to intervene on her behalf. Need we
say that the parents of the girl never received
any assistance from the associates of the Russian branch of English First?

"The group included 28 children and three
adults," say representatives of English First.
"This problem was raised by two mothers out of
the entire group. The rest had no complaints. I
believe that we did our work well."

However, our Rossiyskaya Gazeta correspondent did
not meet a single satisfied parent at
Sheremetyevo-2. On the contrary, we managed to
collect a set of business cards of fathers, who
said that they were preparing a lawsuit.

International educational programs are a
necessary and good thing, we cannot argue with
that. Furthermore, this is a fairly good business
for the English-speaking countries, where they
make money off of people's interest in the
language of international communication. By
organizing language courses, the countries are
killing two birds with one stone: They are
earning money, and they are spreading their
culture. And they are getting a tiny bit of a
foreign one. Thanks to this, it becomes easier
for people on different continents to find a
common language. But not this time. We need not
recount the impression with which the children
left America. They never did learn English.

"I am at level five," Olya Fishkova told our
Rossiyskaya Gazeta correspondent. "But they gave
me elementary things to learn, such as 'do you
speak English?'." But I wanted to brush up on my grammar.

Leon Aron on Russian "Chaos"

From AEI Russian Outlook:

It is very much in the Russian and, even more so, Soviet political tradition for rulers to deprecate their predecessors. As they climb up the power ladder, the would-be Kremlin occupants must profess complete loyalty to the current leader in order to succeed. Once in power, the country's new masters bolster their authority by dissociating themselves from previous leaders. Along with the weakness of the country's political institutions, which undermines the legitimacy of the transitions, such repudiations almost inevitably result in the personalization of power, as the new occupants mold the political, social, and economic systems to their liking. Hence, Russian and--again and especially--Soviet history have often looked like a succession of very distinct personal political regimes--indeed, sometimes different states under the same name.

Thus, at first blush, there is nothing unusual in this Kremlin's castigation of the 1992-99 period, which is portrayed as an unmitigated disaster. It is described as a time of gratuitously and maliciously inflicted humiliation, of "a failed state," and, most of all, of "chaos." Advanced relentlessly, this line of argument has been largely adopted not just by many Russian commentators (who quickly recovered their Soviet skill of line-toeing), but also by some leading Western media, editorialists, and pundits. The latter are apparently untroubled by the fact that a booming economy has sprung from the alleged calamities of the preceding years, like Athena who appeared fully armed from Zeus's head.

For all its conformity to national tradition, the "chaos" propaganda campaign has several features that do not fit the usual pattern. First, President Vladimir Putin was--and continues to be--very popular, and is in no need of gaining additional legitimacy at the expense of his predecessor. In the 1990s, moreover, the breadth and intensity of public criticism of the government (in newspapers, on television, and in the parliament) were unprecedented in Russian, let alone Soviet, history. All the many warts and boils, real and imagined, of the Boris Yeltsin regime were exposed and lanced at the time. Indeed, many Russian pollsters believe that much of Putin's popularity is due simply to his not being the late Yeltsin: very sick, often inebriated, and increasingly unsteady and erratic in public. Thus, harping on the very real failures and hardships of the Yeltsin years can hardly be expected to bring the public's opinion of them any lower than it already is.

A plausible explanation is that the aim of the "chaos" mantra is much higher. As often happens in Russia, the past is invoked to shape the present and the future. In this case, the denunciations of the 1990s may, the Kremlin hopes, help manage the tense transition ahead (or the risks of Putin's decision to rewrite the constitution and run again) and, more importantly, establish the direction that Russia should take in the long run. No one disputes that in the 1990s, Russia was the freest it had ever been, save for the nine months between February and November 1917. Just as undeniable is the ideology of the first post-communist regime. As a leading Russian political analyst put it, it was based on two "simple ideas": that "personal liberty is the foundation of progress of a modern state" and that "Russia has no other way but to follow the Western model of development."

It is this ideology and this model that the current regime seems to be determined to stamp with the "chaos" cliché. If the freest Russia in history produced nothing but misery and disorder, then liberty is, in principle, bad for her. Ergo, Putin's proto-authoritarian "sovereign democracy" and the "vertical of power," in which the executive controls (or owns outright) other branches of government and key sectors of industry.

Such fateful implications make the veracity of the "chaos" claim worth exploring. Specifically, one needs to ascertain, first, whether economic liberalization and democratization bear the primary responsibility for the "chaos," and, second, whether there was anything but chaos in the 1990s.

Ann Althouse on "Honey, I Shrunk the NY Times!"

I saw the notice the other day saying that The New York Times was going to get a little smaller, but reading today's paper, the first smaller one, it didn't register until I got to the editorial page. Then: shock! Only 2 columns of letters instead of 3! The editorials look huge and dominating. I've always liked the letters. I read many more letters than editorials.

The editors try to mollify us:

The available space for letters in print has been reduced by about a third.

Online, we present a bigger sampling of letters on subjects of greatest reader interest. And we will run other letters that were selected for publication but for which there was no room in the print version.

... [A]ll letters will be archived and become part of The Times's permanent record.

It feels like the first step toward the seemingly inevitable day when there will be no paper version.

Charles B. Hall, WWII Flying Ace, Memorialized

In Brazil, Indiana, according to This 'n That:

The Brazil Times of Brazil, Indiana reports that Charles "Buster" Hall will have a memorial constructed in his honor. Charles B. Hall was a native of Brazil, Indiana, which is also the birthplace of James "Jimmy" Hoffa. A street in Brazil, Indiana has already been named for Mr. Hall.

In the book, "American Patriots", (Random House, 2001) author Gail Buckley writes: "On July 2, 1943, Buster Hall, escorting B-25s over Sicily, made the first 99th kill, bringing down a Focke-Wulf 190. There is a photograph of Hall, very young and slightly stunned, the first black American pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft, holding a celebratory bottle of Coca-Cola instead of champagne....Hall's victory brought important visitors: Major General James H. Doolittle, Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz, and Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower...And Buster Hall, owner of the first kill, knocked out two more enemy, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross...But Buster Hall, winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the first black American pilot to down an enemy plane, became a restaurant manager after the war. No airline or commercial transport company would give him a job...." Many black American veterans faced similar racism upon returning to the U.S. after the Second World War.

Gail Buckley, who authored "American Patriots", is the daughter of singer/actress Lena Horne.

Senate Revises Freedom of Information Act

Good news for those seeking information about the activities of the federal government, according to this report from the National Security Archive:

Washington DC, August 4, 2007 - The United States Senate yesterday joined the House in passing bipartisan legislation that will fix several of the most glaring problems with the U.S. Freedom of Information Act that were identified in six government-wide audits of FOIA practice carried out by the National Security Archive. The legislation, authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tx.), overcame a hold placed by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Az) on behalf of Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department. It passed late Friday evening by unanimous consent, on the last day of the Congressional session before the August recess.

After a conference to reconcile provisions between the House and Senate versions, the new law will mandate tracking numbers for FOIA requests that take longer than 10 days to process so they will no longer fall through the cracks, require agencies to report more accurately to Congress on their FOIA programs, create a new ombuds office at the National Archives to mediate conflicts between agencies and requesters, clarify the purpose of FOIA to encourage dissemination of government information, and provide incentives to agencies to avoid litigation and processing delays.

"These are commonsense reforms that will finally force agencies to fix egregious backlogs and reporting problems," said Archive staff counsel Kristin Adair. "But, remarkably, it took several congressional terms to get these straightforward adjustments into the law, with obstruction from the executive branch all along the way, including, ironically, a secret hold by a Senator acting at the behest of the Department of Justice."

Similar legislation passed the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly during Sunshine Week in March 2007, but progress on the Senate bill has been halted for months by a hold placed by Sen. Kyl on behalf of the Justice Department. After multiple editorials, including several in Sen. Kyl's homestate Arizona Republic, assailed Kyl's position and nicknamed him "the Secrecy Senator," Kyl's staff negotiated new compromise language and allowed the bill to reach the floor today.

"This is a small step for open government, but a giant leap for the United States Senate," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. "We applaud Congress' action to fulfill the intent of the Freedom of Information Act. This legislation will correct many of the deficiencies in FOIA that the Archive's audits have revealed."

The most recent audit by the Archive, the Knight Open Government Survey released in July 2007, found that the oldest still-pending FOIA requests had languished in federal agencies for as long as 20 years.

The previous Knight Open Government Survey, released in March 2007, found that only one out of five federal agencies had complied fully with the last FOIA reform legislation, the Electronic FOIA Amendments passed in 1996, intended to post so much government information on the Web that many FOIA requests would become unnecessary.

The Archive's audits of federal government FOIA practice are supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Archive partners in the efforts to reform the FOIA include the OpenTheGovernment.org coalition, the Sunshine in Government Initiative, the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Public Citizen and Public Citizen Litigation Group, and dozens of other groups that signed on to support the House and Senate bills this year.

Inside the Scottish Parliament

After completing our Hadrian's Wall walk, we rented a car to visit Glasgow and Edinburgh. Glasgow made a strongly favorable impression, especially the lovely Argyll Hotel near Glasgow University--tartan carpeting and drapes, kippers for breakfast. Lots of culture nearby: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Glasgow School of Art, the Hunterian Museum, the Kelvingrove Museum, the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art. The town has definitely been "regenned," as the British say. Scotsman Gordon Brown probably was of some help in this.

Afterwards, we visited Edinburgh--where Gordon Brown went to University. We didn't go into the castle because they wanted 11 pounds per person ($22), but stayed outside. We did see the wonderful National Gallery of Scotland, which had some real masteripieces as well as a nice (though crowded) cafe--free admission--and the National Museum of Scotland (admission free). It had an incredible collection of ancient artifacts from Druids, Vikings, and Romans--including an actual leather Roman tent preserved in a peat bog, Roman fabrics, jewelery, and Viking graves. The Museum exhibits gave the story of Hadrian's wall from the other side of the wall--Romans were "alien invaders," who "oppressed" the natives in an "Imperial" power grab. For Romans, substitute "English" and you get the picture of what's going on. We had just seen Sir Trevor McDonald blast Gordon Brown on ITV's News Knight by saying he was "not democratically elected, too fat--and Scottish." So the Scots may have a point (one wonders if any of Sir Trevor's clan members among the McDonalds have had a word with him). No wonder that Scottish pound notes features a picture of Robert the Bruce instead of Queen Elizabeth.

Coincidentally, the British government had just approved construction of two aircraft carriers at Clydeside shipyards. The Scottish National Party minister in charge was asked on television how she could be in favor of aircraft carrier construction while opposed to the Iraq war and militarism. She seemed to answer that with devolution, not only would the ships provide jobs, but indicated the vessels might also become ships in a future Scottish Navy after full independence. After watching that interview on TV, we just had to see the Scottish Parliament. Also, free admission.

The building is covered in faux-wicker on the outside, and not much to look at. Inside, it is beautiful. One curious decorative element was a motif of silhouttes along the walls of debating chamber (you can see them in the left-hand photo above). A tour group told their guide that they thought the figures looked like "whisky bottles" on shelves. No, their tour guide answered, the shapes represent the people looking in on the transparent process of an open democracy--a reminder to parliamentarians.

That sounded reasonable--until we went into the Scottish Parliament's Holyrood gift shop and found a display case with souvenirs including "Scottish Parliament Whisky" described as "our 15 year old Member’s Pure Speyside Malt." Now I think the tour group may have been right--the Parliament decorations may be a tribute to the spirit of the Scottish bard Robert Burns, who wrote: "Freedom and whisky gang thegither..."

US Holocaust Museum to Feature Bergson Group

Jackie Trescott reports in the Washington Post that the US Holocaust Museum is planning to present an exhibit on the Bergson Group--featured in Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?, now available from Kino International on DVD--during World War II:

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has agreed to recast part of its permanent exhibition to include the story of the Bergson Group, a World War II citizens' group that called attention to the horrors facing European Jews and urged the American government to help.

The group was created in 1942 by a Lithuanian Jew who had immigrated to Palestine and taken the name Peter Bergson. He had come to Washington to represent a Zionist group and had visions of creating a Jewish army that would fight alongside the Allied armies. But on Nov. 25, 1942, he saw a story in The Washington Post reporting that the Nazis had killed 250,000 Polish Jews and planned the extermination of half of the Jewish population in that country by the end of the year.

From the Archives (pdf): On Nov. 25, 1942, Peter Bergson saw a story in The Washington Post that reported Nazis plans to kill 250,000 Polish Jews over the next year. The story ran on page 6. Bergson was so angry at the news and the placement of the story that he decided to start a massive lobbying effort. Read the full text of that story, headlined "Half of Jews Ordered Slain, Poles Report," here.

The story ran on Page 6.

Bergson was so angry at the news and the placement of the story that he decided to start a massive lobbying effort.

Some of his tactics were considered divisive and controversial at the time. The group, formally called the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, bought newspaper ads pointing to the failure of the government and other efforts to save the Jews. There were also demonstrations, including a march of 400 rabbis in Washington.

He enlisted celebrities, including writers Ben Hecht and Moss Hart and actors Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni. They created a dramatic pageant called "We Will Never Die," with music by Kurt Weill and readings praising the achievements of Jews throughout history, as well as describing the horrific plight of victims of the Nazis. The pageant traveled the country, drawing 40,000 people to Madison Square Garden. When it was performed at Washington's Constitution Hall on April 12, 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt and dozens of politicians watched it. When Mrs. Roosevelt wrote her next newspaper column about the pageant, according to the Holocaust Museum, "it was the first time [millions of American newspaper readers] heard about the Nazi mass murders."

At one point, Bergson advocated the bombing of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

Finally, the group won the support of Congress, which prepared resolutions asking President Roosevelt to take action. Before the vote, Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board in 1944.

Museum officials said yesterday that at the urging of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies they would revise the segment on the board, a federal agency formed in the waning months of the war to help people flee Nazi oppression. It helped finance Raoul Wallenberg's work and saved about 200,000 people. The materials, which will be introduced next spring, will include wall text and photo reproductions and a new case for artifacts on the Bergson efforts.

While the permanent exhibition is often updated, this is the most extensive revision of one subject to date.

More background here.

Back online...

In case anyone missed us during the last few weeks, someone I know and yours truly were off on a walking holiday along Hadrian's Wall. We made it the whole way from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway, covering some 84 miles in 8 days of walking along the route of an earlier "Clash of Civilizations". Along this line, someone I know sent me this Auden poem, which captures some drizzly feelings that arose out of the mist from time immemorial:

Roman Wall Blues

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

WH Auden